Promoting Open Source in Schools

[Christopher Browne]

On 12/17/05, Peter <plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, William Park wrote:
> > But, in all honesty, thin-client alone will eliminate 90% of IT cost,
> > because it eliminates desktops altogether and all associated cost like
> > payroll of sysadmin, maintenance, upgrade, configuration, etc.  I have
> > better chance of making my living as porn stud, than as Linux salesman.
> >
> > I'm just awed by Microsoft's prowse in all this.  When they say Linux is
> > job killer, they are right on.  While we Linux amateurs talk about
> > technical merits of Linux, Microsoft talks directly to the decision
> > makers and IT staffs.
>
> Why would Linux be a job killer ?! It's a job killer in the sense that,
> if adopted, the IT department will no longer have the grueling
> janitorial job of carting and marshalling megabytes of spam, pron and
> malware to the bit bucket, and they will advance beyond the all-time
> intellectual low point of 'reinstalling' more often than anything else,
> to doing real, useful work, shaping and configuring their systems, and
> seeing them do what they tell them to.

This is indeed one of the "vital economic fallacies" that people are
prone to fall into.

There are two particularly meaningful perspectives:

 1.  If Linux *were* a "job killer" in the IT department at the schools, this
       ought to be No Bad Thing, as having an IT department is peripheral
       to Providing Educational Services.

       Getting rid of IT jobs in the schools is something that ought to be
       *well* regarded by the two most powerful bodies around, namely
       teachers unions, who want there to be as many TEACHERS as
       possible, and politicians, to whom this gives the opportunity to
       emit platitudes about having more money to put more teachers
       into classrooms.

 2.  IT itself was imagined to be something that would lead to massive
       losses of jobs.  (Look at John Brunner's novels for some of the more
       paranoid examples of this in Science Fiction.)

       In theory, computers should have meant that banks would only
       need a very tiny central staff.  Reality is that those big bank towers
       are teeming with masses of people.  People analyzing reports that
       analyze variances on reports that analyze variances on other reports.

The "job killer" claim is largely a fallacy because economic
side-effects are incredibly effectual, and Linux deployment in a
"saving manner" would have *enormous* side-effects.

To the extent that it *isn't*, Microsoft, if they competently built
the proposed "zero configuration" systems they were advertising a
couple of years ago, would be out killing even more jobs than they
could possibly advocate Linux would be responsible for.

Remember the advertising campaign where Microsoft had "sysadmins"
cheering on some new deployment that was supposedly to save their
companies millions of dollars?  REALITY is that the only way that
happens without destroying Microsoft's licensing cash flow is if the
root of the savings was that the companies could lay off most of the
sysadmins.  Not much joy in Mudville that day...
--
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